Red Rider's Hood Read Online Free

upstairs stopped, and we climbed the stairs. I pried open the door with a crowbar to find the house a mess. Cans and bottles were everywhere, garbage was thrown all around. Grandma was fit to be tied.
    â€œThose lousy, stinking sons of such-and-such,” Grandma ranted. “Those boys are gonna get theirs, let me tell you. It’s gonna come to them in spades, and I’ll be shovelin’.”
    It wasn’t until we were done cleaning the house that I thought to look outside. My car—the beautiful red Mustang that I had restored from a hunk of junk, my latest and greatest red set of wheels—it was gone!
    â€œThey took it!” I shouted. “They took my Mustang!” I ran outside and down the long stone stairs to the street. There wasn’t a trace that I had ever parked it there. The Wolves were now riding around town in
my
car. I screamed from the pit of my stomach, stomping and punching the air.
    Grandma slowly came down the steps until she stood beside me.
    â€œWe gotta go to the police!” I shouted. “We gotta report it!”
    Grandma just shook her head sadly. “You can’t go to the police, Red. Not when the Wolves are involved.”
    â€œBut…but…”
    â€œTrust me,” she said. “Some things are simply
beyond
the police. Cedric Soames’s pack is one of those things.”
    Although I had a mountain of stuff on my mind, I hadn’t forgotten about Marissa. There was only one way to find out whether or not she was in league with her bad-boy brother. I had to show up at the antique shop, just like I had promised, and take her to the movies. I hoped she was being honest about wanting to go, now not so much because I liked her, but because it would burn Marvin’s hide to know that he was responsible for his sister going out with me.
    It was already late afternoon by the time I left Grandma’s house. I had to take two buses to get to the antique shop—something I hated, because it reminded me that I didn’t have a car anymore. The buses were late, the traffic was slow, and I didn’t get there until a quarter of eight: almost sunset at this time of year. The CLOSED sign was already hanging in the window. I kicked the sidewalk in frustration. She was probably gone by now. I went to the door, but it was locked, so I went around to the back alley.
    The alley was a narrow lane, unevenly paved, filled with bits of broken glass and Dumpsters that smelled like bad fish on a hot day. I knocked on the back door of the shop. To my surprise, the door opened when my knuckles hit it.
    I slipped inside. “Hello?”
    The lights were off, and the sun, low in the sky, shone through the front window at a crooked angle, glinting off thecrystal and making the dust in the air glow like snow under a streetlight.
    â€œAnybody here? Marissa?” Maybe she was in the bathroom. She wouldn’t have left the back door unlocked if she had gone home.
    No answer. In the dark corners, antique Mardi Gras masks peered out at me. A ventriloquist’s dummy leered at me from a shelf, its lips twisted in a porcelain sneer. I kept thinking its eyes followed me, along with the eyes of all the other masks and little statuettes in the room.
    â€œMarissa?” I said, getting more spooked by the minute. The sun shifted behind a building across the street, leaving the antique shop in an eerie twilight gloom. Everything was in shadows, and every shadow seemed to be moving. A jingling sound behind me rattled my nerves, and I spun. No one was there. Just a wind chime shifting slightly. Something was wrong about that, and it took me a few seconds to figure out what it was. Wind chimes move in a breeze, and there was no breeze.
    Suddenly something came down on my head. A pattern of lights flashed in my eyes, kind of like seeing stars in a cartoon. There was a sharp pain in my skull, and I felt my cheek hit the floor before I even realized I had fallen